


you were a city exiled from skin (your mouth a burning church)

by pansexual_intellectual



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: "and all i could hear was your pulse" inspired, Dubious Consent due to soulmate shit, Harry is """"""""Overwhelmed""""""", I mean, Kinda, Like, M/M, Soul Bond, Soulmates, ambiguous ending, and there’s an ending, it’s just not the most defined ending that’s ever existed, prose, shit happens, you can pretty much guess the outcome i think?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:46:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pansexual_intellectual/pseuds/pansexual_intellectual
Summary: a fan sequel to the exquisite one-shot "and all i could hear was your pulse" by belatrix.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	you were a city exiled from skin (your mouth a burning church)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [belatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/gifts).
  * Inspired by [and all i could hear was your pulse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10165643) by [belatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix). 



> I wrote this because of my absolute adoration for aaichwyp (weirdest acronym ever can i just say). hope it lives up to the real thing (although considering, probably not).

He had said never once, never _again_ but he can’t bring himself to reciprocate the force his once-self had felt. It is too much for him. He’s in bed with his scarlet coverlet wrapping him in a matted, too-warm, tangle and his soulmate is gone-gone-gone and he’s hurt-hurt-hurting.

What _were_ you, he thinks- delirious, a significant part of him gone with Voldemort, nestled under the smooth expanse of his torso, turned as if on a lathe, perfect curving ribs and shoulders that Harry wants to bite. The other part of him, the part that is breathing harshly into the sheets, the part that doesn’t know if he’s crying or not because it wouldn’t make a difference, the part that’s bleeding nail-streaks of blood from his palms, is aching and swollen for himself, for Voldemort, for everything he has been denied. 

As if in response to the ache on the underside of his ribs, Harry feels the aperture buried somewhere deep inside of him widen, shake to attention. 

He slides out of bed, padding silently to his trunk. The Cloak swallows up his figure- flushed, thin, rumpled - like the night does courage, and Harry trots out of Gryffindor Tower, steps easily finding the now-familiar path. 

He is traitorous, he is weak, he is cowardly, but his steps don’t falter. 

Tom is standing in their thicket, a long dark line in the snow. 

(When they kiss, he tastes like blood and ashes.) 

* * *

They don’t talk. It’s easier, to moan and gasp and shake but voices in the crux of motion wreck it, words ruin this thing between them.

Perhaps they should, but what for? They already know each other more intimately than they have known anyone. 

(And he knows he would _fit_ with Tom, more perfectly than he does in Hogwarts, in the red-and-gold aerie of Gryffindor Tower, in the warm akimbo refulgence of the Burrow- _too bright too warm for as cold a lonely orphan like him_ \- even within the dark, flat, walls of Grimmauld, Sirius watching him with desperate love. He knows Tom would breathe to life the filthy dark things Harry hides inside him, the demon that wants to kill Umbridge-Vernon-Petunia-Dudley, a litany of humanity hurting him, wants to drag sharp things down their limbs and split skin at the seams; Harry would love Tom as only a Gryffindor can, as no one’s ever done before, like he would rather be burned alive than see Tom hurt.) 

They are a tangle of limbs and hearts and souls in the burning snow, they are enemies- prophesied - stars - flung across the heavens, in the low moan Tom gives when Harry bites at his lip hard enough to draw blood, in the nails raking down Harry’s back. 

Harry feels a sense of vicious satisfaction in the blood pooling from Tom’s lip, the stinging of cuts, flush on his back. Yes, he thinks, this is right, this is another type of battle. This is not sleep and soft smiles, this is in the nails, in the teeth, in the claws that come out when it’s just them two, fucking each other into submission, because _militat omnis amnas,_ because this will end in bloodshed, because love is another war. _Every lover is a soldier_. 

_Harry_ , Tom snarls into Harry’s neck like he’s bleeding out on the cold ground and Harry’s name is poison on his lips, like he’s dangerous. (Good. He is.) _Harry_ , and he hears the cold, high, voice singing _Harry Potter_ sweetly enough he can almost forget which voice cried the words that felled his parents. 

_Tom_ , Harry laughs, half-hysterical as Tom arches into him, and Tom makes an impotent sound against his collarbone-half outrage, half hopeless desire: yes, he knows the things that swim in those dark eyes, yes, there are flocks of terrible things in the crescent-moons of his nails (digging into his back, his hip, his scalp, oh), a murder of crows crowning that dark, curling, hair. 

_Tom_ \- a girl spread out on the Chamber floor, hair like a pool of blood about her white face, and a boy so beautiful it hurt to look at him and when Harry stabs his soul with the fang of a basilisk it burns it _burns_ \- 

“No,” Harry says as he comes, _no_ but it might as well be another yes. (They both know he doesn’t mean it.) 

* * *

“Mate, are you alright?” Ron, Hermione, grass prickling against his back. Why is it, Harry wonders, that they can charm cloth as much as they like to be impenetrable by blade or steel, but grass hurts just the same?

“Mmm,” he turns, curls on his side, the vertebrae of his spine curving over the soul he shelters within him, a second spark. 

He lets the chatter drift around him. Meeting Tom every few weeks is taking a toll on him- for all that the bond ossifies, tightening with every gasp, every bitten-off sigh, every unmeant _no_ , when they’re apart, the pain intensifies- a hundred knives, a thousand, a million. Stars in the sky, knives on skin, pain. He can’t breathe sometimes, he can’t _breathe_ \- 

* * *

He’s staring bloodless at the mirror and his eyes are shifting, crimson twining with green, the color dissolving into murky dissonance.

(Red, red, red, Voldemort’s eyes and the stains on his shirt from Tom’s nails.) 

Horror, some faded reaction, and there’s tired amusement from the left corner of his ribs, where the sharp bone meets flat stomach, where one soul meets another. 

_And you thought I wouldn’t change you,_ Tom whispers, a tongue licking up the auricle of his ear. 

_Change_ , Harry thinks back, indistinctly, _and who_ \- 

But Tom’s gone, the impression of him simply footsteps on plush velvet, and Harry subsides. When Tom’s gone, it’s like he doesn’t _exist_ \- 

* * *

“Mr. Potter,” McGonagall says, and he looks up, startled. The trees outside the window are gaining leaves, small pale slips of things that look they’ll flutter away in a brisk wind, and the snow’s melting. It’ll be warmer the next time he meets Tom-

“Mr. Potter!” Her Scottish brogue thickens when she’s upset. “If you are not feeling well, you may choose to visit Madame Pomfrey, but otherwise, _pay attention._ ” 

Harry nods. What can Madame Pomfrey do for him? He’s slipping away, colorless as the leaves on the bare branches, he comes alive under Tom’s hands only. His soul, capricious as it is, is creeping further towards Tom, towards the crux of them, the apex of their joining. He doesn’t have enough energy to be normal, to smile and talk and fly, his extremities are numb with uncaring, he is exiguous, extraneous. 

“Yes, Professor,” soft as kitten fur, he can’t keep his eyes open, how will it feel to kiss Tom on earth and greenery instead of snow? 

* * *

_Am I losing myself?_ Harry cries, soundless when Tom enters him. A pause, a huff, and then _so dramatic_ , and tonight, oh, tonight, Tom is angry. Harry’s head has been aching all day, his skull lashed with blistering rage, and now Tom fucks it into him, hips pistoning into the spot that makes him see stars with brutal accuracy. He comes with a shivering gasp, mouth open on Tom’s shoulder, teeth sinking in. Tom snarls and finds his release and for a moment it’s perfect, shivers and breath shared like candle-flame, fogging the freezing air. Tom hisses something unintelligible against Harry’s neck, tongue licking a leisurely path down the tendons and lapping at the hollow of his throat. Just souls, just souls, Harry reminds himself, but how can he say that when Tom’s curled up against him, dark eyes somnolent, when Harry feels the swell of inchoate longing in his sternum like a physical weight?

Tom shifts, pulling out of him, and Harry feels the sense of loss with a dull sense of pain, heat spilling out of him with Tom’s cock, and then Harry’s cold, so cold, the snow burns usually, but today it’s like lances of fire against his skin. 

(There’s blood on the snow and the earth is black as ebon, Harry thinks of a princess and a huntsman and a coffin of glass and crystal. Of poison. _Bring me her heart, I will eat it._ ) 

Tom pulls back, his long clever fingers a delicious warmth against Harry’s arms, and Harry drowns in his eyes. 

* * *

He wakes warm, wrapped in a cloak that doesn’t belong to him. There’s a crackling fire and the snap of smoke, and the fabric, when he presses it to his nose, smells like Tom.

Looking around, he realizes he’s in Gryffindor Tower, and wonders if he should tell someone that Voldemort appears to have no trouble walking directly into Hogwarts. 

His fingers tighten on the cloak. 

He doesn’t move. 

* * *

_Do you become a rose-tree_

* * *

Harry draws a knife across the pad of his finger, watching as blood spills from the seam of broken skin. Tom shares his blood, Harry recalls with distant accuracy, remembering the cauldron, the knife, the bones and all the dreadful pain of a soul wrenching towards another, reality fraying at its tattered edges, the world sheering away in a blur of nightmarish phantasmagoria.

Laboriously, Harry dips a needle into his blood and etches several runic formations on the inside of a silver ring he’d found in the Room of Requirement. He doesn’t take Runes, doesn’t know his Tiwaz from his Eihwaz, but his fingers move in practiced motions, like he’s done this a hundred times before. 

There’s a silver shine to the corners of his periphery, his mind held in utter stillness, for it is not needed for this. 

This is for the soul, this is for the thing that calls itself a man and hitches pianist’s fingers through the bent bars of his ribs like a prisoner. 

Harry works for hours. 

* * *

_and I the rose upon it_

* * *

When he sees Tom next, he slips the ring on Tom’s finger wordlessly. Tom bends and presses a kiss to Harry’s temple like his hands aren’t stained with a thousand deaths, like they don’t deal in bloodshed, like Tom hadn’t stolen the ones who’d loved Harry most, like Harry’s never raked his nails against Tom’s back and called it love, laughing all the while.

(When he leaves, he drops a thin chain around Harry’s neck, and Harry wonders if the same mindless, cool, fervor possessed him as it did Harry, to carve something he could press his soul into and give it to his soulmate. The chain is thin and silvery, and strung on it is a black stone etched with a strange symbol: a circle, a thin line, and a triangle.) 

* * *

_She’ll sting you one day_

* * *

After that, Harry can breathe easier, the stone against his skin humming with the same frenetic, contained, energy that Tom carries with him. There’s a core of something else in it, an otherness that makes something cool and light sing through Harry like a tuning fork, the light bent around the stone as silvery as the raiment of his Cloak.

* * *

_Oh, ever so gently,_

* * *

After that it’s different. Harry isn’t sure if he likes it, but his soulmate’s words are soft when they curl up together on the forest floor (the snow is gone by now, lush greens blooming through packed soil) and his soul is begging, begging, begging, and when his soulmate turns to go Harry feels like he’s tearing a part of himself away. 

_You’re always **leaving**_ , Harry murmurs into the hollow of Tom’s throat. He pretends not to notice how Tom smirks into his hair. 

_Don’t miss me too much,_ leering like nothing could be funnier than Harry, missing him. 

_You’re not funny._ Harry says into his skin. 

Tom brushes his lips across Harry’s hair, extricates himself with ease, tosses a fanged smile Harry’s way. 

_Aren’t I?_

(When the stone around his neck isn’t enough, Harry goes to the Room, following the tight strings around his soul, to a piece of finery arrayed brilliantly on an ugly bust. It’s a diadem, glimmering with a chalcedony gleam, even through the dust. _Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure._ ) 

* * *

__

__

_so you hardly ever feel it,  
_

* * *

It’s March when Harry realizes he’s in love with Tom, or might as well be. What, then, is the difference between heart and soul? If his soul calls to Tom’s, if he comes alive in traitorous fire under Tom’s burning fingers, what does it matter if his mind rebels? This is a viscera undeniable, this is thick charcoal and riotous colour sort against the thin, cool, ink-sketch of the mind.

He plays chess with Ron, curls up with Hermione in the common room, but his mind is with Tom, and he hates it as much as he adores it. 

* * *

_’til you fall dead_.

* * *

“Harry, mate-” 

“Harry-” 

“…non-responsive, fever of-” 

“…and you’re certain-” 

The words blur in, out. No one knows quite what to do with him, not even the boys of Gryffindor Tower who’d come prepared, toting sneers and smirks and Rita Skeeter headlines, expecting sullen-faced snarls and enraged mood swings and instead found Harry, just Harry, curled up and shivering too-hot too-cold under the sheltering heat of scarlet bedclothes. 

He thinks of Tom, of snow and fire and Tom’s cock, driving into him and them, becoming one- for the first time in the summer, for the first time in his _life_ he had felt the cold, the heat, the sensation of skin-on-skin, all of it coalesce into seething clarity, the monster under his ribs satiated at last. (It doesn’t last. A day, another, and then he’s crying out in his sleep again, please please please I need you in Parseltongue, in English, in some obscure language of the heart and soul.) And he aches. He aches. There is sensation, restless against the stickiness of his skin, there is discontent in the moon-shadows under his brow, there is pain in the soles of his feet, which ache to stand and walk (run, _fly_ ) until he is by his soulmate’s side once more. Every inch of his body is pining for Tom. 

People. Motion, the rocking of a body like a boat. White sheets, crisper than his own (which are crumpled and sodden with the weight of blood-sweat-tears). 

“… perform some tests. Last time we checked it…” 

“…and you think….” 

“…changed? But…” At last! A familiar voice, Hermione, and Harry cries out for her but even as she flits to his side, he knows she cannot help him, for him there will be no peace. No period of slumber and content. He is a throbbing mess of nerves and slavering hunger, he is overlaid and inter-stitched with another so much so that he cannot- live - exist - continue - 

“Tom, Tom, Tom,” Harry sobs out, and the voices silence at once, caution and concern and suspicion creeping over, tide-like and unsubtle. There is a hush. There is a blank space, and with it he fills his soulmate’s name. “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, _Tom_ …” And so it goes. Only his voice, weeping, and in this he finds mean satisfaction because his soulmate is beautiful and his name, too, is beautiful and to fill reams of empty air with it is only fitting. 

“When did you last see Tom, Harry?” Dumbledore says, carefully, and Harry arches in the bed- hospital-issue, crisp, icy - straining, because _Tom_ is all he hears and all he wants. “Tom,” Harry agrees, voice petering into a high wail, and Dumbledore grips his shoulder. 

Harry hates it, he hates the touch of that cold, cool, hand, so unlike his Tom’s which is burning, burning, burning- 

“…. hysterical, we need….” 

“Madame Pomfrey, a sleeping draught? Yes, thank you…” 

“Good Merlin! Sedate him…” 

“I’ll call in- there’s an expert in St. Mungo’s…” 

_Tom_ , Harry cries out, his voice turning inward, prising apart the clutch of his ribs, arrowing neatly for the aching, throbbing, swollen, heart in the center of it all, singing into the void. Tom, Harry prays, will be on the other side. Will hear him. 

* * *

The boy is exhausting. Tom refuses to refer to him in name, not even in the sanctity of thought- _especially_ not in his mind, for that is where it matters most. What does the bond care if he says the boy’s name? It feels only the things in the innermost grip of him, the things he dares not voice. _Want want want_ , it sings, _need need need_. He knows if he thinks the boy’s name, it will flare up in a riot of fire and glory, and the boy’s lost, wavering, voice he hears but does not hear on the other side of the abyss that separates them will find brethren, sanctuary. It is both a petty thing and an act of survival.

He is in Nepal at the moment, seeking help from the soul-witches on the most remote crags. They’re peering at him, wary but not afraid, gowned in robes- rags, really - of indeterminate colour and then he _feels_ so much he bends double, and he hears but does not hear the boy’s voice, crying out _Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom_ , thudding in time to his heartbeat, sounding like _want want want_ , sounding like _need need need._

The soul-witches are excited, he notices vaguely, crowding around him and calling out commands in a elegant language, hands on skin and none of it is the boy’s, none of the skin has the breath-smooth clasp of his soulmate’s, the sheen of sweet, cloying, juvenescence. He’s on the- there’s dirt grinding in the back of his robes - he needs - he - 

Lord Voldemort has experienced the Darkest curses mankind has dreamed of, tortures wrought for creatures such as himself; he has had his entrails expelled and his eyeballs torn apart and still he has never felt such an exquisite torment as this, there is no tormenter as lovely as his boy, his soulmate, violently green eyes and wild black curls, lithe and glowing. 

_Don’t_ , he thinks, and _no_ , but his mouth forms words anyway: _Harry_. 

It is as a stone dropped in the center of a clear, round, pool- ripples, concentric reverberations, _Harry Harry Harry_ echoing in the white bone-chamber of his skull, pulsing in time to _Tom Tom Tom_ and _want want want_ ; _need need need._

“ _Help_ ,” He chokes out, rotating his head upwards until his eyes find the vastness of the searingly blue sky, until they hear him, “Help.” 

A blur of incomprehensible words. Nothing- he, he, he, he can’t- 

Pain is pain is pain, this is a lesson Tom has learnt intimately- pain is pain is pain is pain, there is no out and you _bear it_ and then murder the person who caused it in short order, but here there is a shining, golden, thread that he can follow to _Harry_ , to his boy, and he tries desperately to stop his hands from stretching out, grasping it. 

“You can only find your mate,” One browned soul-witch tells him, frowning, and he cries out in defiance of those words, curling inwards, a hand digging sharp nails into his sternum, as if by drawing blood he can dig out his recalcitrant heart and be done with it. 

This is _repulsive_. He should be - can’t- could - wants - _needs_ \- 

There’s a sharp, short, pause, a swell of respite, and then the assault emerges once more- crippling. _Tom,_ the boy cries out, desperate, lost, pleading. _Tom, I need you_ \- 

A hand, fingers, golden thread- 

He is plunged into eyes of deepest green. 

_Sedate him! Get him- Pomfrey, the Sleeping Draught, do you- what do you mean, we’re out- Stupefy! Stupefy- the Stunners aren’t working, sweet Circe-_

 _He arching up on crisp white sheets and he’s shaking because there is an absence where there should be his soulmate’s arms and he hears the whisper, the curling of rose-thorns through the curvature of his ribs and it’s not enough. Tom. Tom Tom Tom Tom Tom Tom; somewhere there is the serpentine monster who pressed a finger to his scar and said_ I can touch you now _, who murdered his parents in cold blood but he can’t find him, it is as if he never existed in the first place, all there is in his memories is miles of pale skin and pink lips and dark, dark, eyes and a cock he wants to swallow whole-_

Tom blinks out of his soulmate’s eyes, choking wordlessly because the boy is _fifteen_ (but he can’t deny the quicksilver want pooling low in stomach). Shale-tourmaline shades blur in front of his eyes, swimming in the shallows of his sclerae. Rapid-fire Nepalese, another, more esoteric magical languages chopping the air into steady strokes. A wrinkled hand pushing firmly on his clavicle, incanting low and he’s tumbling into a glissade of shivering warmth, the boy’s soul reaching for him with eager, needy, fingers. 

_He can tell that they are reaching for him, trying to stop him, subdue his frantic movements and none of it works. The soul-fire has caught him, he is shivering in the embrace of the maddest torments, and they cannot do a thing. A blur, the green robes of a Healer, a thick-faced man with snarling eyes, and then there’s pain- not the intricate, intimate, pain that aching for Tom brings, but the intrusive, unwelcome pain that scythes through his veins and makes his skin burn, burn._

__

_Enraged, he claws at the warped, bulging, features of the man, and falls back with a wordless scream, for the pain increases, exponentially, and there is nothing but pain, the welcome, seething, clutch of soul-pain, the terrible externalia of the surface world-_

Tom gasps out of it, rage blurring the lines between him and his soulmate because _how dare they touch him_. How _dare_ they- 

He struggles to his feet, shaking, and the first soul-witch is shouting something at him but he pays her no mind, turning on the spot and Disapparating with nary a pop. 

* * *

  
He has barely a split second to register that perhaps, Apparating directly into Hogwarts, where several of his worst enemies lie and are no doubt crowded around the boy’s bedside, is not the best idea he’s ever had before there’s a sticky, enveloping, substance coating every limb in a deluge of drowning warmth, crawling into his pores and worming into his nostrils- _the Hogwarts wards_ his mind supplies, and no one has Apparated through it before, but the enraged, wrathful, fire emergent of his soulmate’s pain sears through it with nary a thought and he’s slamming on the stone floor so hard his knees ache.  


Instantly, silence stabs through the hospital wing- Albus has his length of grooved elder arrowed at Tom’s heart in moments, Severus has gone ivory-pale, the lines and sinews of his face freezing into an sallow carving of perfect stillness, and every other adult has their inferior wand pointed at some necessary part of his body - but he has eyes only for his soulmate - _snow, fire, and tight, wet, heat, his soulmate’s mouth on his, tongue stroking his until he breaks apart, gasping into the boy’s skin_ \- who has, in apparent defiance of every law of (magical or other) physics known to wizard-kind, launched himself dozens of feet into the air, heedless of the tranquilizing potions coursing through his veins and landed inches away, feet slipping on the floor in his haste to plaster himself to Tom, and- 

His soulmate’s touch, skin on skin, fills him with a gasping sort of relief and he cannot help the low moan that escapes him, cannot help burying his hands in the boy’s wild curls, nails digging into the scalp, he does not care if he draws blood for even the boy’s blood belongs to _him_. Harry- _Harry, Harry, Harry,_ he can utter the boy’s name at last, the splintering ache borne of separation is gone, lost, and there is an inferno of needy warmth in its place - wraps his slim legs around Tom’s waist, hitching himself further upwards, looping his arms around Tom’s neck. 

Tom reaches a hand under Harry’s crumpled nightshirt- his legs are _bare bare bare_ and there is want, there is lust, there are his soulmate’s thoughts _a cock he wants to swallow_ burning needily in his mind - and when his hands find smooth, warm, skin, interspersed periodically with the fragile musculature and bones, as thin and light as that of a bird’s, he groans. 

There transposed: the image of his soulmate wrapped around him, thick lashes and elfin features, those large, unearthly, eyes holding something strange and terrible, some lost essential thing carried on a lonely wind to twine into a babe’s irises, to shine murkily in its eolian depths. 

Harry lets out soft whine and arches into him, the crux of his soft, bare, thighs hard against his own arousal, and Tom may want Harry so much it feels as if the force of his wanting will sear his decades of accumulated knowledge to cinders and scattered, fragmented, pages but he refuses to fuck his soulmate in a room containing _Albus Dumbledore_. 

With effort, he pulls his face from where it’s buried in Harry’s sweet-smelling hair and snarls wordlessly at Dumbledore. Glaring blue eyes, wrinkled skin drooping in gnarled echelons, regrettable capability rife in the turn of his fragile-looking, veined, hand. 

“I will take my soulmate now,” Tom says, unrelenting, and tears his way out.

* * *

They’re curled up in a bed- the mere actuality of it, the physicality is astonishing, his encounters with Tom have always belonged to fire and snow, not soft sheets and easy warmth - and Tom’s petting him. Long clever fingers, his soul thrumming in glee.

Harry closes his eyes, consciousness skimming the surface of Tom’s thoughts, quicksilver shallows and darting, sleek, bodies. He turns, fastens his mouth to Tom’s, licks into it daringly, and Tom makes a muffled noise of surprise, a large hand curling over Harry’s throat. Harry allows it. 

_And now?_ Tom begins, and Harry’s eyes open, slowly, black eyelashes brushing Tom’s eyelids. 

_Shh._

Under Tom’s palm, Harry’s pulse thrums, the wingbeats of a bird under tissue-thin skin.

**Author's Note:**

> The quotes "Do you become a rose tree, and I the rose upon it", as well as "She'll sting you one day/Oh, ever so gently/so you heardly feel it,/'til you fall dead" are from the Grimm brothers. The first is from the fairy tale Lina and Fundevogel, which is beautiful and everyone should read it. (I'm actually working on a tomarry adaptation of it right now....).


End file.
